Pop culture under the microscope

By Kristen Peterson

Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2008 | 2 a.m.

With so much of America caught up in commercial culture, someone has to keep score — analyze what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and the consequences of our actions.

For 20 years the Far West Popular Cultural Association has taken on that job by bringing together professors, writers and grad students in Las Vegas, a city emblematic of pop culture, to look at the players, interpreters and perpetrators of contemporary mainstream culture.

Led by Felicia Campbell, a professor in UNLV’s English department, they dissect movies, TV, music, race, gender, cell phones, literature, video games and fashion. This year’s event was kicked off by a presentation by H. Peter Steeves of DePaul University, titled “The Reality Reality Show,” a philosophical look at reality through skits inspired by reality TV.

For those too busy to watch television, go to blockbuster movies or follow entertainment trends, here’s a tiny sample of what they were looking at:

1. Pop artist

The pop art movement fed society what it had been digesting in mass media and consumerism. So, too, does Quentin Tarantino.

In “Quentin Tarantino and the Director as DJ,” Michael Rennet, an adjunct professor at Moorpark College in California, compared the layering and multiple referencing of music by contemporary DJs to director Tarantino’s layering and multiple references to music and film in his works. Rennet suggested that “artistically both the DJ and today’s cinephile are simultaneously consumers and producers, first discovering found objects, and then creating a work for these texts.”

2. Subversive Rockwellian

Ratings show that FX’s “Nip/Tuck” is a crowd pleaser. With plastic surgery dominating our pursuit of idealized beauty, the show, in many ways, illustrates contemporary America — just not in the way Norman Rockwell chose to portray society.

In “Sex, Gender and Cultural Transformation: ‘Nip/Tuck’ Under the Knife,” Olivier le Blond from West Virginia University examined the show’s triviality, the pervasiveness of plastic surgery and the show’s ongoing unconventional sexual escapades. He suggested its popularity might lie in its functioning as a catharsis that comforts viewers by satisfying the voyeur in each of us.

The bloody surgeries and risky sexual adventures in the show’s office, which le Blond referred to as the home away from home, are the basic ingredients that most viewers want to see.

3. “Pinkie” and “The Blue Boy”

In “Pink Eye: Reading Humor Through a Gendered Lens,” UNLV’s Gina Sully questions why we should make a distinction between American humor and women’s humor when male and female humor find common ground in home life, stereotypes, relationships, community and mass culture. The “objectivity/detachment, hierarchical ordering and completion” of “so-called masculine writing” and the engagement and cooperation of “feminine” writing aren’t enough to distinguish them and suggest that the separation is caused by “the incongruity between our democratic ideals and women’s long exclusion from the literary canon. Capitalism’s need to categorize people, to construct human beings as market ‘demographics,’ undoubtedly plays a role.”

4. Avant-gardist

Mainstream America isn’t known for delving into the avant-garde. It prefers to keep to conventional norms. But then along comes the movie “Blades of Glory,” which pairs two men who compete as a skating couple against an incestuous brother-sister team.

Referencing Judith Butler’s matrix, in which “heterosexuality is accomplished through stabilized formations of gender,” William Rogers from the University of Texas examined the stereotypes and dichotomies of gender and the ways the film complicates heterosexuality before it “culminates in the flowering of a heterosexual relationship between the most effeminate male of the movie and his feminine object of love.”

5. Agent provocateur

There is always a voice of reason, and in the contemporary media it seems to be Austrian filmmaker and social critic Michael Haneke, who paints the bleakest landscapes of contemporary society.

Haneke’s dark and disturbing films are designed to jolt viewers out of their “media-complacent apathy,” according to Dennis Russell, associate professor of mass communication at Arizona State University. He looked at the filmmaker’s messages and techniques in “The Culture of Emotional Paralysis: Existential Underpinnings of Michael Haneke’s ‘The Seventh Continent.’ ”

“He offers a scathing critique and indictment of the impact of mass media, TV in particular,” Russell said. “The impact he’s depicting is one in which the media is offering a skewered version of reality. The media manipulates. The viewer believes that the reality is so the reality.”

It’s never that linear with Haneke, Russell said. “It’s a cinema in which he forgoes solutions, happy endings and endings that offer pat answers for the complex, vexing social problems that Western culture faces. It’s left to the filmgoer to make interpretations to what answers should be and to interpret the motivator of the characters himself.”

Kristen Peterson can be reached at 259-2317 or at [email protected].